MRR journey
The Month I Killed My Free Plan at $16K MRR
A bootstrapped founder removed a freemium tier at about $16,200 MRR in 2026. The honest 90-day ledger: signups halved, support fell ~38%, and MRR grew ~21%.
8 min read55
Tag
#2026
51 posts tagged.
MRR journey
Burnout at $15K MRR: a solo founder's diary (2026)
The month the chart was green and she was not. A solo founder's diary of burning out at $15,000 MRR in 2026, and the five boring boundaries that pulled her back without crashing the numbers.
7 min read79
MRR journey
The month I found 7% of my MRR leaking to failed cards: an involuntary churn diary (2026)
A bootstrapped founder's MRR chart went flat at $28K. It was not a retention problem. It was involuntary churn, the revenue that leaks out when cards fail and no one notices. Here is the ledger, and the boring fixes that recovered two thirds of it.
8 min read63
MRR journey
My first $1,000 month: a SaaS founder's diary (2026)
A bootstrapped founder's honest ledger to her first $1,000/month in 2026: 35 customers at $29, why she waited too long to charge, and why ads returned almost nothing.
8 min read63
MRR journey
Raising Prices on Existing Customers: My $18k MRR Diary
A bootstrapped founder raised prices at ~$18k MRR in 2026. The real 90-day ledger: who churned, who stayed, and the segmented plan that lifted MRR 16%.
8 min read76
Founder narrative
The month my churn quietly doubled at $20K MRR: a retention diary (2026)
My SaaS MRR climbed 27 percent in a quarter while gross churn quietly doubled and net revenue retention slid below 100 percent. A first-person 2026 diary on catching the leak.
8 min read63
Founder narrative
How FeedbackPanda Hit $55K MRR With No Audience
Arvid Kahl now teaches audience first, but FeedbackPanda hit $55K MRR in two years with no personal audience. Here is what actually drove the growth.
6 min read83
Founder narrative
Bannerbear Revenue: How Jon Yongfook Compounded a Solo API the Slow Way (2026)
Bannerbear's first eight months earned about $400 a month. It took 16 months to reach $10K MRR and a patient year of technical tutorials to reach $27K. The real lesson of Bannerbear's revenue is the shape of the curve, not its size.
6 min read124
Founder narrative
Testimonial.to Revenue: How a Boring Widget Beat AI
Testimonial.to revenue hit $800K ARR bootstrapped by one founder, out-earning his AI product PDF.ai four to one. Damon Chen's real numbers, and the lesson for 2026.
6 min read136
Founder narrative
How Tally Makes Money Giving Its Forms Away Free
Tally reached $4.3M ARR in 2025, bootstrapped, by giving unlimited forms away free and charging just 2% of users. Why free is the growth engine, not the discount.
8 min read194
Founder narrative
Marc Lou Sold the Shovel: How ShipFast Outearned His Startups
Marc Lou launched about twenty startups that mostly failed, then built ShipFast in a week and made $6,000 in 48 hours. A sourced look at how a Next.js boilerplate outearned everything he built for end users.
5 min read65
Founder narrative
The $500K ChatGPT Wrapper: How Tony Dinh Shipped TypingMind Before It Was Ready
TypingMind launched five days after OpenAI opened the ChatGPT API and crossed $500,000 in revenue within a year. Here is what solo operators can copy from Tony Dinh's build-in-public playbook.
5 min read202